Responsive Web Design

By Ethan Marcotte

Originally published: Jan 11, 2011

Reprinted with the permission of A List Apart and the author.

The control which designers know in the print medium, and often
desire in the web medium, is simply a function of the limitation of
the printed page. We should embrace the fact that the web doesn't
have the same constraints, and design for this flexibility. But
first, we must "accept the ebb and flow of things.

John Allsopp, "A Dao of Web Design"

The English architect Christopher Wren once quipped that his chosen
field "aims for Eternity," and there's something appealing about
that formula: Unlike the web, which often feels like aiming for next
week, architecture is a discipline very much defined by its
permanence. A building's foundation defines its footprint, which
defines its frame, which shapes the facade. Each phase of the
architectural process is more immutable, more unchanging than the
last. Creative decisions quite literally shape a physical space,
defining the way in which people move through its confines for
decades or even centuries.

Working on the web, however, is a wholly different matter. Our work
is defined by its transience, often refined or replaced within a
year or two. Inconsistent window widths, screen resolutions, user
preferences, and our users' installed fonts are but a few of the
intangibles we negotiate when we publish our work, and over the
years, we've become incredibly adept at doing so.

But the landscape is shifting, perhaps more quickly than we might
like. Mobile browsing is expected to outpace desktop-based access
within three to five years. Two of the three dominant video game
consoles have web browsers (and one of them is quite excellent).
We're designing for mice and keyboards, for T9 keypads, for handheld
game controllers, for touch interfaces. In short, we're faced with a
greater number of devices, input modes, and browsers than ever
before.

In recent years, I've been meeting with more companies that request
"an iPhone website" as part of their project. It's an interesting
phrase: At face value, of course, it speaks to mobile WebKit's
quality as a browser, as well as a powerful business case for
thinking beyond the desktop. But as designers, I think we often take
comfort in such explicit requirements, as they allow us to
compartmentalize the problems before us. We can quarantine the
mobile experience on separate subdomains, spaces distinct and
separate from "the non-iPhone website." But what's next? An iPad
website? An N90 website? Can we really continue to commit to
supporting each new user agent with its own bespoke experience? At
some point, this starts to feel like a zero sum game. But how can
we—and our designs—adapt?

A flexible foundation

Let's consider an example design. I've built a simple page for a
hypothetical magazine; it's a straightforward two-column layout
built on a fluid grid, with not a few flexible images peppered
throughout. As a long-time proponent of non-fixed layouts, I've long
felt they were more "future proof" simply because they were layout
agnostic. And to a certain extent, that's true: flexible designs
make no assumptions about a browser window's width, and adapt
beautifully to devices that have portrait and landscape modes.

Huge images are huge. Our layout, flexible though it is, doesn't
respond well to changes in resolution or viewport size.

But no design, fixed or fluid, scales seamlessly beyond the context
for which it was originally intended. The example design scales
perfectly well as the browser window resizes, but stress points
quickly appear at lower resolutions. When viewed at viewport smaller
than 800×600, the illustration behind the logo quickly becomes
cropped, navigation text can wrap in an unseemly manner, and the
images along the bottom become too compact to appear legible. And
it's not just the lower end of the resolution spectrum that's
affected: when viewing the design on a widescreen display, the
images quickly grow to unwieldy sizes, crowding out the surrounding
context.

In short, our flexible design works well enough in the
desktop-centric context for which it was designed, but isn't
optimized to extend far beyond that.

Becoming responsive

Recently, an emergent discipline called "responsive architecture"
has begun asking how physical spaces can respond to the presence of
people passing through them. Through a combination of embedded
robotics and tensile materials, architects are experimenting with
art installations and wall structures that bend, flex, and expand as
crowds approach them. Motion sensors can be paired with climate
control systems to adjust a room's temperature and ambient lighting
as it fills with people. Companies have already produced "smart
glass technology" that can automatically become opaque when a room's
occupants reach a certain density threshold, giving them an
additional layer of privacy.

In their book Interactive Architecture, Michael Fox and Miles Kemp
described this more adaptive approach as "a multiple-loop system in
which one enters into a conversation; a continual and constructive
information exchange." Emphasis mine, as I think that's a subtle yet
powerful distinction: rather than creating immutable, unchanging
spaces that define a particular experience, they suggest inhabitant
and structure can—and should—mutually influence each other.

This is our way forward. Rather than tailoring disconnected designs
to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat
them as facets of the same experience. We can design for an optimal
viewing experience, but embed standards-based technologies into our
designs to make them not only more flexible, but more adaptive to
the media that renders them. In short, we need to practice
responsive web design. But how?

Meet the media query

Since the days of CSS 2.1, our style sheets have enjoyed some
measure of device awareness through media types. If you've ever
written a print style sheet, you're already familiar with the
concept:

In the hopes that we'd be designing more than neatly formatted page
printouts, the CSS specification supplied us with a bevy of
acceptable media types, each designed to target a specific class of
web-ready device. But most browsers and devices never really
embraced the spirit of the specification, leaving many media types
implemented imperfectly, or altogether ignored.

Thankfully, the W3C created media queries as part of the CSS3
specification, improving upon the promise of media types. A media
query allows us to target not only certain device classes, but to
actually inspect the physical characteristics of the device
rendering our work. For example, following the recent rise of mobile
WebKit, media queries became a popular client-side technique for
delivering a tailored style sheet to the iPhone, Android phones, and
their ilk. To do so, we could incorporate a query into a linked
style sheet's media attribute:

the actual query enclosed within parentheses, containing a
particular media feature (max-device-width) to inspect, followed by the target value (480px).

In plain English, we're asking the device if its horizontal
resolution (max-device-width) is equal to or less than 480px. If the
test passes—in other words, if we're viewing our work on a
small-screen device like the iPhone—then the device will load
shetland.css. Otherwise, the link is ignored altogether.

Designers have experimented with resolution-aware layouts in the
past, mostly relying on JS-driven solutions like Cameron Adams'
excellent script. But the media query specification provides a host
of media features that extends far beyond screen resolution, vastly
widening the scope of what we can test for with our queries. What's
more, you can test multiple property values in a single query by
chaining them together with the and keyword:

But in each case, the effect is the same: If the device passes the
test put forth by our media query, the relevant CSS is applied to
our markup. Media queries are, in short, conditional comments for
the rest of us. Rather than targeting a specific version of a
specific browser, we can surgically correct issues in our layout as
it scales beyond its initial, ideal resolution.

Adapt, respond, and overcome

Let's turn our attention to the images at the base of our page. In
their default layout, the relevant CSS currently looks like this:

I've omitted a number of typographic properties to focus on the
layout: Each .figure element is sized at roughly one third of the
containing column, with the right-hand margin zeroed out for the two
pictures at the end of each row (li#f-mycroft, li#f-winter). And
this works fairly well, until the viewport is either noticeably
smaller or wider than our original design. With media queries, we
can apply resolution-specific spotfixes, adapting our design to
better respond to changes in the display.

First of all, let's linearize our page once the viewport falls below
a certain resolution threshold—say, 600px. So at the bottom of our
style sheet, let's create a new @media block, like so:

If you view our updated page in a modern desktop browser and reduce
the size of your window below 600px, the media query will disable
the floats on the design's major elements, stacking each block atop
each other in the document flow. So our miniaturized design is
shaping up nicely, but the images still don't scale down that
intelligently. If we introduce another media query, we can alter
their layout accordingly:

By specifying a wider min-width in a new media query, we
can shift our images into a single row layout.

But this is only the beginning. Working from the media queries we've
embedded in our CSS, we can alter much more than the placement of a
few images: we can introduce new, alternate layouts tuned to each
resolution range, perhaps making the navigation more prominent in a
widescreen view, or repositioning it above the logo on smaller
displays.

By designing responsively, we can not only linearize our
content on smaller devices, but also optimize its presentation
across a range of displays.

But a responsive design isn't limited to layout changes. Media
queries allow us to practice some incredibly precise fine-tuning as
our pages reshape themselves: we can increase the target area on
links for smaller screens, better complying with Fitts' Law on touch
devices; selectively show or hide elements that might enhance a
page's navigation; we can even practice responsive typesetting to
gradually alter the size and leading of our text, optimizing the
reading experience for the display providing it.

A few technical notes

It should be noted that media queries enjoy incredibly robust
support among modern browsers. Desktop browsers such as Safari 3+,
Chrome, Firefox 3.5+, and Opera 7+ all natively parse media queries,
as do more recent mobile browsers such as Opera Mobile and mobile
WebKit. Of course, older versions of those desktop browsers don't
support media queries. And while Microsoft has committed to media
query support in IE9, Internet Explorer currently doesn't offer a
native implementation.

However, if you're interested in implementing legacy browser support
for media queries, there's a JavaScript-tinted silver lining:

A jQuery plugin from 2007 offers somewhat limited media query
support, implementing only the min-width and max-width media
properties when attached to separate link elements. More recently,
css3-mediaqueries.js was released, a library that promises "to make
IE 5+, Firefox 1+ and Safari 2 transparently parse, test, and apply
CSS3 Media Queries" when included via @media blocks. While very much
a 1.0 release, I've personally found it to be quite robust, and I
plan to watch its development. But if using JavaScript doesn't
appeal, that's perfectly understandable. However, that strengthens
the case for building your layout atop a flexible grid, ensuring
your design enjoys some measure of flexibility in media query-blind
browsers and devices.

The way forward

Fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries are the three
technical ingredients for responsive web design, but it also
requires a different way of thinking. Rather than quarantining our
content into disparate, device-specific experiences, we can use
media queries to progressively enhance our work within different
viewing contexts. That's not to say there isn't a business case for
separate sites geared toward specific devices; for example, if the
user goals for your mobile site are more limited in scope than its
desktop equivalent, then serving different content to each might be
the best approach.

But that kind of design thinking doesn't need to be our default. Now
more than ever, we're designing work meant to be viewed along a
gradient of different experiences. Responsive web design offers us a
way forward, finally allowing us to "design for the ebb and flow of
things."

Learn more about Responsive Web Design

As it turns out, Ethan is also giving our first virtual seminar of
2011: The How and Why of Responsive Web Design. At the end of this
Thursday's seminar, you'll understand why you should adopt a
responsive approach to your design, learn how you can start with
flexible designs, and how you can manage different kinds of
fixed-width media in a flexible layout. Learn more about this
virtual seminar.

Share your thoughts with us

Did you know about responsive web design? What do you do now to
adapt your workflow to better accommodate a responsive product ?
Share your thoughts with us on the UIE Brain Sparks blog.